Featured Artist: Nick Mason

My portrait drawings are a hybrid of hyper-realism and expressionism. They explore the nature of lines as material, and the different ways a pencil can be worked within one composition. It is within this transitional area– the moments between the tight render and the loose sketchiness– that the exciting things start to happen. While I really enjoy rendering hyper-realistically, I still love the look and feel of simple, pure lines. Realism masks the identity of the material by manipulating the lines to create an image that is perceived as a new thing. I want to achieve this while still including the beauty of raw, naked, expressive lines. American artist Larry Rivers, is the biggest influence on my style, and was a pioneer of using this technique of blending rendered drawings with expressive line work in the 70’s and 80’s. My work exists as an extension of this in a way that feels incomplete yet whole.